Random

18Dec

Just so you know what time of year this is, here is a pic I took a few minutes ago. People in the Northern Hemisphere, eat your hearts out!

And speaking of weather, or rather, climate, Miranda has been regurgitating again** with her accustomed objectivity and deep scientific training: “The tantrums from Australia’s screeching environmental banshees have barely abated since the Government revealed its plan to cut Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions from between 5 and 15 per cent by 2020, an amount deemed too small by green groups.” Or: “The fact is temperatures have not risen in a decade, and have actually been falling in recent years, despite increasing carbon emissions. The tide has turned for the fundamentalist zealots of the climate change movement as more scientists declare their doubts that the science on climate change is ‘settled’, and opinion polls show the public growing ever more reluctant to make personal sacrifices to reduce carbon emissions…”

AUSTRALIAN temperatures remained hotter than average this year, the World Meteorological Organisation reports, summing up the year as one marked by extreme weather events.

They included floods, severe and persistent droughts, snowstorms, heatwaves, cold waves and the shrinking of the Arctic sea ice to its second-lowest level on record.

The year is expected to rank as the 10th-warmest on record for the planet. Temperatures were about one-third of a degree above average despite the normally cooling impact of a La Nina event. Australia’s temperatures were 0.37 degrees above average, making this year the 15th-warmest on record for the nation since 1910, even with a strong La Nina bringing flooding rains to Queensland and NSW.

"Its warmer than most previous La Nina years," said Dr Andrew Watkins, a senior climatologist with Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology. "Generally with La Nina events we get cooler than normal temperatures over Australia."…

I don’t consider myself a “banshee” or a “fundamentalist zealot of the climate change movement” — as I probably demonstrated in Very quick assertions, not arguments, about the Rudd government’s climate package, but Miranda is just such an idiot on this topic, and persistent too. Yes, what we do in fact makes only a small difference, but to still believe there isn’t a problem is to be in a very select group, most of whom Miranda quotes – again. Visit the side bar and look for Climate sceptics… There you will find plenty of reasons for taking Miranda less than seriously.

Meantime, the HSC is out, and The Mine has done not too badly. 60 Band 6 in English is not bad at all, given The Mine’s clientele.

The graphic links to the Herald story from which it is taken. Doesn’t one of those arrows point the wrong way??

I was also happy to see a coachee from a little while ago made it into the top 1% in ESL English.

Miranda Devine and her husband are coming over for Christmas drinks tonight. She’s good company, even if we do fundamentally disagree on the most important issue facing the country.

Last week she ripped into Kevin Rudd’s policy response to global warming, the Government’s multibillion-dollar plan to reduce Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions. She quoted Professor Bob Carter describing the plan as "a non-solution to a non-problem". She weighed into the "screeching environmental banshees" who say the policy is not enough. She raised the grim fact that while Australia contributes 1.5 per cent of global greenhouse emissions, "China will almost double its emissions by 2030, from 18.3 per cent in 2005 to 33 per cent in 2030, [so] even if we reduced our emissions by 100 per cent, as the crazies want us to, our sacrifice would be meaningless".

Good point. Rudd’s grand plan is a grand illusion. It is so badly designed it would have been better if the Government had done nothing and let the US president-elect, Barack Obama, provide the leadership next year.

At this point, Devine and I diverge. Because I believe this policy is a non-solution to a big problem. Rudd’s strategy has been praised as political shrewdness, but it is political capitulation….

The Discovery of Global Warming -- hypertext history of how scientists came to (partly) understand what people are doing to cause climate change: from the Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics.

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